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A week at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods

Greetings from Vacaville, California, the former home of Charlie Manson from 1976 to 1985 where he made many audio recordings from the penitentiary, including a series that was going to be released by SST as a record called Completion after the murderer reached out to Henry Rollins.

That was the extent of my knowledge of Vacaville until my daughter started going to school at UC Davis, which sits off of Interstate 80 between Vacaville and Sacramento. Usually I stay in Sacramento when visiting Annie, but this time I found a cheap room in the Marriott system in Vacaville. Maybe I’ll make some audio recordings.

Since I left for New York on March 31 I’ve been home for about eight hours but after a brief side quest to Ventura to visit novelist, Pynchon scholar, and Razorcake co-founder Sean Carswell tonight, I’ll finally be heading home tomorrow—with a few stops along that way. It’s been an incredible journey.

In Brooklyn, I saw a car illegally parked outside of Bay Ridge Pizza. It was the delivery guy’s car, and he’d ripped off the top of a pizza box and displayed it on his dashboard like a parking placard. Pretty ingenious.

In Barcelona, I witnessed a spectacular collision when a young man on a bicycle was filming his friend speeding downhill on a skateboard, weaving in and out of pedestrians. The man on the bicycle crashed into a metal trash can bolted to the street and went over the handlebars. He was shaken up and uninjured, but it could have been a disaster.

In Frankfurt on Main, I visited a fountain in the main square with a statue of lady justice that was the inspiration for Metallica’s …And Justice for All. The statue looks nothing like the album cover, but that’s the story I was told and I’m sticking to it.

In Kraków, I was so cold at night I went to a shopping mall inside the main train station and bought a cheap pair of sweatpants that said LA in Old English lettering on one leg, and BEAST on the other.

Speaking of LA Beasts, check out the lineup of this panel I’m participating in this weekend. I’ll be at the Lit Fest in the Dena at the Mountain View Mausoleum at 2300 N. Marengo Ave. in Altadena on Sunday May at 3:30pm with Keith Morris, Iris Berry, Patrick O’Neil and Todd Taylor. Is that a beastly line-up or what? This event is free and I hope to see you there!

As I mentioned last week, I just finished a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods in Soquel, California. My friend Ben Leroy (Hi Ben!) loves this place and has coming to Wellstone for years and has been encouraging me to visit for a long time. The idea of residencies has always appealed to me, especially when I was working at the haunted casino or the ad factory. Who doesn’t want more time to write?

But once I started working from home ten years ago and then transitioned (i.e. was let go) to freelance five years ago, the idea of a residency has lost a little bit of its luster. That said, ever since I did final edits on Make It Stop in 2022, I’ve been on a tear, writing a new novel and half of another one, a half-dozen short stories, a book for hire, a book proposal, about a dozen pieces for the LA Times, an equal number of Razorcake columns, and this newsletter. Maybe a block of time to focus on one thing wasn’t such a bad idea?

When I passed through Capitola last year to visit Annie in October, I spent some time in the Redwoods and was bowled over by their beauty. I even wrote some poems about the experience. That more than anything made we want to come back and check out Wellstone to see if it was right for me. I’m so glad I did.

The Wellstone Center in the Redwoods sits on the edge of the forest. On my first day at the center, I sat on a bench and watched a banana slug devour a leaf in the shadow of a stand of ancient Redwoods. Walking in the forest felt like I’d been transported back in time. The forest path was spongy and soft with decaying leaves and the trees towered hundreds of feet overhead. The canopy left the trail cool and dark but in those places where shafts of sunlight hit the trees, the bark, which is so layered it feels like its own ecosystem, was shockingly red.

The hosts are lovely people and I got to meet the other writers during communal dinners that each writer takes turns cooking. I got a ton of work done at Wellstone. When I was in Europe I used all my free time to work on a book project that has been on hiatus for a while. I worked on it in Brooklyn and Barcelona, on flights to Frankfurt and on busses to the Polish countryside. I’ll have more to say about this project soon, but what I can tell you is that I had no time to work on my own stories.

I arrived at Wellstone after three days of travel from Kraków to Stuttgart, Stuttgart to Barcelona, Barcelona to Chicago, and Chicago to San Diego. I slept for about six hours and then left at four in the morning and drove nine hours to Northern California. I was exhausted, but because I wanted to get back on a regular sleep schedule, I went right to work. I may have fallen asleep in the hot tub while listening to an owl hooting in the distance, but I did it.

I’m happy to say that after eight days at Wellstone my novel is back on track, something that hasn’t been true since February when I finished Part I. Now I’m closing in on finishing Part II (I think) and in a couple weeks I’ll be on to the next part. But on that first day, while jet lagged and road tired and exhausted from lack of sleep, a solution to a major plot hole arrived out of nowhere.

It was one of those things that makes writing so mysterious and difficult to explain. It’s like randomly pointing a telescope at the sky and finding the star you’re searching for. I’m convinced it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t opened up the shop, so to speak, which makes no sense considering the condition I was in. I won’t be ready to address that plot point for months, but the solution presented itself, and when it’s time I’ll be ready for it.

I had a similar experience walking in the Redwoods, I was looking at the trees and thinking about how I lack the language to understand what I was seeing, the precise names of the trees, the wildflowers in the undergrowth, the way the trees exchange information with each other through their interconnected root systems. I felt so small and insignificant, an interloper, if you want to get down to it, when my brain said, “Here you go, Jim, here’s an idea for your little story. Stop thinking so much and good luck.”

Maybe I’ll dedicate this book to the trees.

After two days of hanging out with Annie, I feel rested. I miss Nuvia. I miss San Diego. I miss boxing and burritos. And, of course, I’ve missed you. But I’m not going to lie. I’m ready to be still for a while.  

But not for too long. It’s May and at the end of the month I’ll be heading to Las Vegas to cover Punk Rock Bowling for the LA Times. Who else is going to be there? Maybe we should have a meet-up…

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with a playlist of all the new and old music I’ve been exposed to on my trip. I haven’t done a ton of reading but I have some book recommendations as well. If you’re a paid subscriber, Orca Alert! will resume this weekend.

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and killer whales.